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What's Up With That? Historic posts mark miles
Staff writer
Imagine traveling along a secluded road in a strange place without a global positioning system, map or gas station to pull into and ask for directions.
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Instead, an occasional post is all that informs you of where you've been and how many miles to the next town.
Those stone and iron mile markers are what travelers relied on nearly two centuries ago when they rolled west on the National Road from the burgeoning East Coast to secluded towns such as Uniontown, Washington and Wheeling.
"It was sort of our first form of directional information because, in those earlier years, we didn't have maps," said Mary Ellen Weingartner, manager of Zane Grey National Road Museum near Norwich, Ohio. "It was mapping information to tell people how far they've come."
The markers placed along the National Road, also known as U.S. Route 40, have changed several times since they were first installed when construction ended in these parts around 1818.
The first markers in Pennsylvania were made of stone and placed every five miles along the southern side of the road, according to Donna Holdorf, executive director of the National Road Heritage Corridor Museum in Uniontown.
Those were the only directional markings for 18 years until cast-iron obelisks were placed on the northern side in 1835. Each marker gave information about the mileage to the next town and larger cities such as Cumberland, Md., and Wheeling, Va. (West Virginia did not become a state until 1863).
"The average day of travel was 15 miles, so you knew where the next town was where you could find lodging," Holdorf said. "They didn't ride or sleep in wagons, so they always stopped the night in a tavern - not a drinking tavern, but a place to sleep."
The roughly 90 iron markers in Pennsylvania were cast at Snowden Foundry in Brownsville or by Maj. James Francis of Connellsville.
By the 1990s, about half of them were rusted, destroyed during car accidents or stolen. Holdorf, her crew and local Boy Scout troops repainted the originals or installed fiberglass replacements.
But the markers in Ohio are much different. Those installed in the Buckeye State were made of sandstone and different stonemasons chiseled the lettering into the markers. Each was about 3 feet high and weighed more than 700 pounds.
Workers installed an estimated 176 markers in Ohio from 1825 to 1840 at a cost of $9 each, Weingartner said. It is thought that only one-third of those original markers in Ohio remain.
It is suspected that nearby residents keep them as souvenirs while other markers are relocated because of residential developments. Some people, however, regularly clean them and trim the grass around their bases.
"It's unfortunate that many of them have disappeared," Weingartner said. "People don't realize they are a part of the National Road and should be left where they're placed."
Especially because they are a significant part of history.
Washington County was an isolated section across the Allegheny Mountains when the road was completed in 1818. Travelers usually navigated the mountains using the primitive Old Braddock Trail. For the first time, farmers could send produce east rather than sell it locally, according to Earle R. Forrest, who published several stories about the National Road in the Washington Reporter in 1955.
Forrest reported the road held several names, including United States Road, United States Turnpike and Cumberland Road.
He marveled at the last original stone pillar in this state near Farmington, Fayette County, that remained after more than 100 years, calling it "the most interesting and valuable relic of the pike." It still had the original writing of "SM 53 TO CUMB" that told travelers their location and vicinity to Cumberland.
And like the travelers who navigated the National Road on horseback and wagons, that last remaining original marker in Pennsylvania has disappeared, as well.
